SOURCE: “Children of Canada,” in Sight and Sound, Vol. 9, No. 7, July, 1999, pp. 58–60.

In the following essay, McKellar writes of his first impressions and his later impressions of The Brood.

I saw David Cronenberg’s The Brood in Toronto in 1979 at the world’s first Cineplex. I went with a friend to see The Silent Partner, another good Canadian film, and afterwards we walked around the complex and looked in through the doors of all the other theatres—the doors had little windows, like in an operating theatre. You could only just see what was playing inside because in those days the screens were very small and the image was very grainy because it was reel projection. Looking through that little window with my friend, the image I saw was a scene near the end of the film where Samantha Eggar opens up her white robe to expose her...